The death of Osama bin Laden will raise the inevitable question: What are we still doing in Afghanistan? The answer, of course, is that the mission in Afghanistan is about something bigger and more ambitious than eliminating Al Qaeda’s leaders—most of whom, in any event, are probably living in Pakistan, as bin Laden was when the United States finally tracked him down. No, the mission in Afghanistan isn’t about killing Al Qaeda members. It’s about stabilizing the country so that it can never again serve as the hotbed of extremism that it was until 2001, with all of the attendant national security and human rights problems that resulted.

But that in turn raises other questions: Is it worth prolonging a war that has stretched on for nearly ten years for that broader goal? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: Even if that goal is worth fighting for, is it actually achievable? 

Over the past few years, a consensus has formed in Washington that the answer to that last question is a resounding no. For years, war in Afghanistan has been portrayed as a hopeless failure. The government in Kabul, we have been told, is corrupt and predatory. The Afghan army is a mess. Tribal loyalties trump national loyalties. The Taliban is gaining in strength.

All of this rendered a decision made by President Obama last autumn rather odd—at least on the surface. Obama had long promised that American troops would begin leaving Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. As Vice President Joe Biden had explained: “In July 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.” But then, over the course of a week in November, the White House announced a major reversal of course: A large-scale troop presence would remain in Afghanistan for an additional three years, until 2014.

Only a handful of journalists seemed to realize the magnitude of the news. For its part, The New York Times characterized the new approach as “a change in tone,” a curious label for several more years of war.

But while Americans barely seemed to notice, people in Kabul certainly did. In December, a few weeks after Obama’s announcement, I met with Hedayat Amin Arsala, a courtly senior minister in the Afghan government and a confidant of President Hamid Karzai. We were seated in a basketball-court-sized office adorned with a massive chandelier in a nineteenth-century building in central Kabul. Arsala had been dismayed by Obama’s initial plan to begin withdrawing in 2011. “I was not very happy with it,” Arsala recalled, choosing his words carefully. “It gave the impression to the opposition that if they stick to their guns a little longer, they might be able to succeed after that.” Arsala, reflecting the views of many Afghans both inside and outside the government, expressed relief that Obama was now reversing himself. In fact, he hoped the American president would go even further, and hammer out a long-term agreement with Afghanistan so that American troops could remain in the country into 2015 and beyond. “Between now and 2014, we will be working on this together with the United States,” he told me. A range of other American and Afghan officials confirmed that such an agreement is currently being worked on.

Then came this month’s killing of Osama bin Laden—and while Americans rejoiced, many Afghans were, according to the Times, worried that the successful operation would hasten the departure of American troops. “This should not be used as a justification for premature withdrawal,” warned one former Afghan official.

What is going on here? First, Obama had concluded that a war which was widely believed to be failing was in fact still worth prosecuting. Then, Afghans had made it known that they were relieved the United States would be sticking around. Now, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, they were reminding the United States that they expected it not to renege on this promise. Is this a case of a stubborn American president—unwilling to admit defeat, egged on by Afghan allies—doubling down on a completely failed enterprise? Or is it possible that the Afghanistan war is actually succeeding?

Major Jim Gant of the Army Special Forces is a rangy, intense Pashto speaker with tattoos of Chinese characters on his right arm. Like many of his fellow Special Forces officers in the field, Gant sports a shaggy beard and wears an Afghan scarf loosely wrapped around his neck. He has been at the forefront of an unlikely transformation in counterinsurgency tactics, so much so that he’s been nicknamed “Lawrence of Afghanistan.” Gant’s rise to prominence started in late 2009, when he published a paper on the website of Steven Pressfield, a novelist and military veteran. The article was called “One Tribe at a Time,” and it drew on Gant’s experiences as a Special Forces team leader working with a Pashtun tribe—the Taliban’s historical base is among the Pashtuns—in eastern Afghanistan in 2003. Based on his experiences, Gant advocated that small units of autonomous Special Forces embed with Pashtun tribes and train them to fight the Taliban.

While most policy papers languish on desks or hard drives unread, Gant’s paper ricocheted around the upper echelons of the military. It even reached General David Petraeus, who called the paper “very impressive, so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely.” After that, the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, stepped back from “door-kicking” missions and instead began to advise and build up local forces. In what the U.S. military has termed “Village Stability Operations,” members of the Special Forces now live among the Pashtun tribesmen in remote areas where insurgents once had unfettered freedom of movement. The goal is to help train community militias, known to the U.S. military as Afghan Local Police (ALP). At present, the government of Afghanistan has authorized 10,000 ALP militiamen; American officers believe that the number will eventually rise to something more like 24,000.

Getting the ALP approved by Kabul required a significant concession from Hamid Karzai, who had feared that arming tribal militias might rejuvenate the warlordism that has plagued Afghanistan since the early 1990s. To address Karzai’s concerns, the ALP is administered by the Afghan Ministry of Interior, and everyone admitted to the program has to submit to biometric scans. On the ground, militia candidates are vetted by local village councils.

This December, at a base near Kabul, I bumped into Gant at a meeting with some senior Special Forces officers. Gant said he was pleased with the progress and noted that in the Pashtun language the community forces are known by the word Arbakai, a traditional term for forces that secure their own area. “The Taliban are very threatened by this,” Gant said. “It’s taking their safe haven away.” Other experts I spoke with affirmed that the community policemen have created “security bubbles” that didn’t exist before.

If Gant’s approach sounds familiar, it should. That’s because it draws on the same principles as the counterinsurgency tactics that worked for Petraeus in Iraq. Ultimately, the effort in Afghanistan will either succeed or fail based on the counterinsurgency practices, like Gant’s, that Petraeus has put in place. I recently got to see Petraeus—who took over the Afghanistan mission last year, and has just been nominated by Obama to head the CIA—in action during a briefing at the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul. When he walked into the briefing room, it was precisely 7:30 a.m., and a bevy of generals and a couple dozen staff officers immediately stood up. He hurriedly motioned for them to sit down and images began to be projected onto screens around the room. Some screens showed the weather in various parts of Afghanistan, others the numbers of American soldiers recently killed, and others maps of insurgent activity. Over secure videoconference lines, commanders from around Afghanistan gave status updates about their sector of the war, with Petraeus alternately quizzing, cajoling, and complimenting them. The only interruption came toward the end of the briefing, when a scuffle broke out over a recalcitrant goat. A group of officers had dragged the hapless animal, a Navy mascot, into the room in honor of the upcoming Army-Navy football game. “Thanks fellows,” said Petraeus, sounding slightly impatient. “That was really cute.”

Counterinsurgency is often misunderstood as being mostly about winning “hearts and minds”; and, as Gant’s program shows, there’s certainly an element of that. But, at the most basic level, it’s really a set of common-sense precepts about how to avoid being hated while simultaneously applying well-calibrated doses of violence—that is, killing people. The importance of killing to counterinsurgency is an unpalatable truth that often gets disguised with Orwellian neologisms such as “kinetic operations,” but Petraeus clearly understands that reaching “hearts and minds” goes only so far on its own.

As a result of stepped-up operations, many of the Taliban’s longtime safe havens in Helmand and Kandahar have been eliminated, according to the U.S. military. Of course, the Pentagon has reason to give optimistic reports; but I was struck to see that the International Council on Security and Development, an organization long critical of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, is also echoing this assessment, based on its own on-the-ground research.

Meanwhile, operations by Delta Force and Navy Seals have decimated the ranks of mid-level Taliban commanders. This March, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in a typical three-month period, 360 insurgent leaders were killed or captured. (According to a number of observers, the average age of Taliban commanders has dropped from 35 to 25 in the past year.)

On the administrative front, Petraeus has managed to put a stop to particularly senseless policies. At its worst, the Afghanistan conflict has been sustained partly by a contracting system under which U.S. funds take a perverse path from Afghan contractors to Taliban leaders. That is, a fair portion of the money paid out by Washington for a given project, such as the construction of a road, has made it into the pockets of insurgents in exchange for not attacking that road. Petraeus has put in place new contracting guidelines to try to tame this problem.

Petraeus also appears to be making progress in standing up an effective Afghan National Army. Currently, the army is the most well-regarded institution in the country, with approval ratings over 80 percent. While Tajiks are overrepresented in the officer corps, and Pashtuns from the south of the country are grossly underrepresented among the rank and file, overall, the army is ethnically balanced, retention rates (while hardly stellar) are rising, pay rates went up two years ago to $140 per month for a raw recruit (the average yearly income in Afghanistan is less than $400), and the army is on track to reach its November 2011 end-strength goal of 171,000.

But will all these changes in military strategy actually lead to long-term victory in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, anyone observing the country learns to live with alternating feelings of hope and despair. As heartened as I often felt when seeing the military progress, I found the corruption of key Afghan politicians to be deeply depressing. More significantly, the war is exacting a steep cost in American lives. Since Obama took office, some 890 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan. That’s around 60 percent of the total who have died there since the war began in the fall of 2001.

Most of the eastern provinces remain infested with insurgents, as do provinces near Kabul such as Ghazni. The so-called “reintegration” process, in which Taliban foot soldiers lay down their arms and reenter their communities, is largely moribund. Data from Indicium Consulting shows that incidents involving insurgent IEDs, small arms fire, rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks have more than doubled in recent years, from around 8,000 in 2008 to more than 17,000 in 2010. Efforts at striking deals with the Taliban have led nowhere. The most promising discussions occurred last year between the Karzai government and senior Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour—except that “Mullah Mansour” turned out to be a crafty Quetta shopkeeper who had spun a good yarn about his Taliban credentials in order to make some quick money. Meanwhile, official meetings held between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in places like the Maldives to discuss “reconciliation” have produced nothing. One sardonic Afghan official offered me a simple reason for why the parties had agreed to meet for negotiations. “Everybody wanted to go to the Maldives,” he said.

When I was in Kabul, I asked a small group of leading American counterinsurgency experts if they could think of a case in which an insurgency was defeated under circumstances like the ones we see today in Afghanistan—where insurgents enjoy a safe haven, the government is corrupt, and a third-party military force is intervening on the side of the corrupt government. The experts could not think of a single example. I found just as little solace in How Insurgencies End, a rigorous RAND study, published last year, of 89 insurgencies fought around the world since World War II. Insurgents who have enjoyed a sanctuary have won almost half the conflicts where there was a clear victor. In countries with less than 40 percent urbanization, insurgents have won about three-quarters of the time. And pseudo-democracies, such as Afghanistan, have a particularly poor record of defeating insurgencies, because they neither have the stomach for total repression nor the capacity to offer accountable government. They lose about 85 percent of the time.

Then there is Pakistan, which has, to put it mildly, not always been a helpful player in Afghanistan. The Pakistani army has long sought a pliant Afghan state on its western border to balance its Indian neighbor to the east—a doctrine known as “strategic depth”—and it believes the Taliban served this purpose fairly well. Today, Pakistan’s economy is in bad shape: Its inflation rate hovers around 15 percent, and annual growth has fallen from 7 percent to 2 percent, which cannot remotely sustain what will be in 2015 the world’s fifth-largest population. Simultaneously, Pakistan is spending an astonishing 17 percent of its budget on defense and only 3 percent on education. All of these indicators are bad news for Pakistanis, but they’re also bad news for Afghans: In the long run, an unstable Pakistan means an unstable Afghanistan, since the border between the countries is basically ungovernable, and extremists can so easily drift back and forth. 

And yet, against this parade of depressing facts, one must balance some other realities. It helps to begin with some historical context. For all of Afghanistan’s problems, the country has come a long way since I first began visiting it almost two decades ago. I first came to Kabul in 1993, when it was a patchwork of vicious ethnic militias fighting block-to-block, Mogadishu-style. Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was routinely unleashing barrages of hundreds of rockets that had an unfortunate habit of landing on the heads of innocent Kabul civilians rather than on his enemies. I saw boys as young as ten fighting alongside the militiamen. Travel at night anywhere at all was out of the question, and brigands of all kinds roamed the countryside kidnapping and thieving at will. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died, and even more fled the country.

I next visited the country in 1997, a year after the Taliban had seized power. The streets were now quiet, and all women were covered from head to foot. Fierce, black-turbaned Taliban “vice and virtue” enforcers roamed around the cities, enforcing their ordinances in fast-moving pickup trucks, stopping to harass, beat, or arrest men whose beards were of improper length or women whose feet were visible. One day, I saw a man crumpled on the street as a Taliban enforcer beat him with a stick. The man had failed to pray at the appointed hour. Days in Taliban Afghanistan passed unbearably slowly. There was nothing to do, no place to go. There were no sounds of music, no films, no entertainment. The economy was in free fall. Kabul was a ghost town, with only 500,000 inhabitants left. The rest had fled. Streets were nearly devoid of cars. My only glimpses of women were when they flitted through the empty streets like wraiths dressed in blue burkas. When I stayed in Kabul in the winter of 1999, I was the only guest in the only functioning hotel in town, an Intercontinental that had long ceased to have anything to do with the brand. There was no heat or hot water, nor were there any telephones. I was lucky to have one of the few rooms with windows that remained intact from the war. When I visited Taliban cabinet officials, we would sit shivering in unheated rooms in their ministries while they told me what a misunderstood man Osama bin Laden was.

Today, Kabul has three million inhabitants. There are restaurants and bars and social venues—and people are friendly. (Among journalists, the guilty secret is that working in Kabul today is sort of, well, fun.) A decade ago, 9 percent of Afghans had access to basic medical care. Today, 85 percent do. Under the Taliban, about one million kids (almost none of them girls) were in school, whereas now about seven million children are being educated (more than one-third of them girls, with the proportion rising). Before the U.S. occupation, a telephone system barely existed in Afghanistan. Today, one in three Afghans has a cell phone. Afghans once had access to no media outlets apart from the Taliban’s Voice of Sharia radio network. Now there are, in the words of the BBC, “scores of radio stations, dozens of TV stations and some 100 active press titles.” More than five million Afghan refugees have returned home. Kabul has becom so crowded with cars and people that the city’s pollution is statistically more lethal than the war.

Afghanistan’s economy is also booming. Thanks to the improvements in security provided by the United States and NATO, GDP growth between 2009 and 2010 was a strong 22 percent. That’s just the start. According to a thorough study released earlier this year by the Pentagon, an estimated $900 billion worth of mineral deposits is waiting to be unearthed in Afghanistan, including enough lithium to make the country a world leader in raw materials for batteries. The Chinese have already paid $3 billion for the rights to a copper mine near Kabul, and last year JP Morgan put together a $50 million deal for a gold mine in northern Afghanistan. No wonder, then, that 70 percent of Afghans told pollsters for the BBC late last year that their country is now going in the right direction. (By comparison, in a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April, 70 percent of Americans said the United States is going in the wrong direction.) It’s also why Afghans give surprisingly high marks to the U.S. military, even after nearly a decade of often bungled occupation: 68 percent favorable, according to a BBC/ABC poll released in January 2010. (By contrast, a 2007 BBC/ABC poll in Iraq found that only 22 percent of Iraqis supported the U.S. military presence in their country.)

It’s true that overall security has deteriorated recently in Afghanistan, but much of that is due to stepped-up military operations. This is what happened at the start of the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan also remains a safer place than countries such as Russia or Mexico, where political conflict and criminal violence kill proportionately more people. Residents of New Orleans are five times more likely to be murdered today than Afghan civilians are likely to be killed in war.

Even the unhappy RAND study on the success of insurgencies contained some encouraging findings. One of the most important is that when a government has a significant force superiority ratio (9:1 or greater), it “correlated strongly with success” in defeating insurgents. The projected end strength of the Afghan army and police is 375,000, and the Taliban is around one-tenth of this size. That’s not including all of the outside military forces that are also involved on the side of the Afghan government. What’s more, according to the RAND study, “[c]ontrary to conventional wisdom, insurgents do not win by trying to simply outlast the government. In fact, over the long run, governments tend to win more often than not.” While the long run can be all too long—it took more than four decades for the Colombian government to effectively defeat the FARC—the fact remains that time is working against the insurgents, especially with the new lengthening of the U.S. commitment.

Although the White House’s pledge to remain in Afghanistan appears to be firm, calls to pull out have been increasing. One striking example of the new emerging consensus came out earlier this year, when George W. Bush’s ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, wrote in Foreign Affairs that “Washington should accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of the Pashtun south and east”; he advocated de facto partition of Afghanistan as “the best available alternative to strategic defeat.” The plan was merely the most extreme expression of a now-common sentiment amongst the U.S. foreign policy establishment: Let’s just get it over with.

Partition or withdrawal sound simple and alluring; but Blackwill and others don’t seem to fully grasp the problems with such proposals. For one thing, with whom would we negotiate a partition? The so-called “moderates” in the Taliban reconciled with the Afghan government long ago. The remaining Taliban fighters have splintered into several groups, each more extreme than the next. And why would the Taliban honor their side of the bargain? Deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Waziristan and in Swat were merely preludes to the Taliban establishing brutal “emirates,” regrouping, and then moving into adjoining areas to seize more territory.

The human costs of partition or withdrawal would be horrific. When the Taliban took control of the Pakistani tourist destination of Swat between 2008 and 2009, they imposed a reign of terror, beheading policemen and leaving their bodies to rot in public, burning down schools for girls, and administering public lashings to women accused of adultery.

And, finally, there are the strategic costs. Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, but Al Qaeda still exists, and there is no reason to believe that a reconstituted Taliban government would be any less hospitable to Al Qaeda than the Taliban rulers of the 1990s. After September 11, Mullah Omar lost everything to protect bin Laden, and since then he has said nothing to distance himself from that fateful decision.

Of course, just because it would be preferable to succeed in Afghanistan does not mean we actually can. But, when I look at the hopeful signs that are starting to emerge from the country, and when I consider these indicators in tandem with the likely consequences of a hasty exit, I do think the wise choice now is for the United States to stay. In war, perceptions tend to lag behind reality by a considerable distance. In Afghanistan, our efforts were widely thought of as successful for several years after things had clearly begun to deteriorate on the ground. Today, it appears that we have the opposite problem: improvements on the ground that are widely dismissed amid a narrative of defeat.

Staying in Afghanistan isn’t the politically obvious decision: The war is going to remain controversial, and it’s going to be criticized from both the left and the right. Arguably, it could even imperil Obama’s reelection. Still, the president has made his choice and he appears to be sticking with it. This, I am convinced, is good for Afghanistan. One day, I hope, we’ll also realize that it was good for the United States.

Peter Bergen is a contributing editor for The New Republic and the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda. This article originally ran in the May 26, 2011, issue of the magazine.

Weddings to be policed for modesty and segregation as part of crackdown on lavish events that put families in debt

There's an awful lot of flesh on display at Qasre Aros in central Kabul. Arms and shoulders are free to the elements, while necklines plunge daringly low on garish ballgowns made of every shade of synthetic material imaginable and encrusted with fake jewels.

Though the skin may be the orangey plastic of the dozens of mannequins lining the walls, the dresses are worn every night by real Afghan brides. But the days when brides-to-be would flock to the shops of central Kabul's Shar-e-Now Park may be numbered. Conservative elements of Hamid Karzai's government are pushing for far-reaching restrictions on weddings the likes of which have not been seen since the Taliban regime.

Under a law proposed by the justice ministry and soon to be considered by Karzai's cabinet, "garments contrary to Islamic sharia" will be banned. Shops selling "outfits that are semi-naked, naked, transparent, or tight in a way that reveals part of the woman's body" will be fined and, if they persist, closed down.

When plans to regulate Afghanistan's booming wedding industry were announced earlier in the year, the government said it merely wanted to curb the country's mania for lavish weddings that drag people into serious debt.

But according to drafts of the law seen by the Guardian, the government is also aiming to introduce various public morality provisions in yet another sign of the casual erosion of the small freedoms women have won since 2001.

And in an echo of the Taliban regime, which used to police weddings to ensure they complied with hardline rulings including a ban on music, the government also intends to set up committees to monitor weddings.

The groups, which will include representatives of the religious affairs ministry, will be expected to patrol private ceremonies held in the garish, multistorey wedding halls on the edge of Kabul that light up the night with their neon facades.

Among their duties will be ensuring male and female guests do not mix in the same rooms – already a standard practice in most Afghan weddings – and that the bride is modestly attired.

Muhiuddin Alizada, the owner of Qasre Aros, looked bewildered when he was shown a copy of the draft law for the first time.

"This is pointless because the mullahs will not be happy unless the women are wearing burqas," he said. "It is all because of pressure from the Taliban."

Human rights activists are similarly aghast. "A number of experts who have looked at the draft law are of the view that it interferes with private family life and could well be inconsistent with sharia principles and the constitution," said Georgette Gagnon, the UN director of human rights in Afghanistan.

Other shopkeepers were more understanding, even though none of them had a single item of stock that was sharia compliant.

"We are Muslims and women should dress modestly," said Muhammad Shah. But moments later he concluded that there was no way such a law could be enforced. "Gambling is haram [forbidden by Islamic law] but the government can't even stop that."

Sadia, a 26-year-old who got married last week, was outraged by the idea that the government might try to stop her wearing the white, bare-shouldered creation she chose for her wedding.

"When I'm wearing this dress I feel very beautiful. Why shouldn't I wear it?" she told the Guardian during a four-hour session in a beauty parlour on the morning of her wedding.

"If I don't wear it people will think I have a very bad husband who says I cannot wear these things. This is a day I will remember all my life and every girl is hoping to wear these clothes."

Under the proposed law, not only would she have to be more frumpily attired, she would also have to go for something far cheaper. The government wants to impose a maximum spend on wedding dresses of just over £60.

Alizada says his cheapest frock is £137, a dowdy thing that has been used more than four times. Most brides rent their dresses, paying anything between £125 and £250. If they buy they have to pay more than £600.

The law also bans large parties in wedding halls to celebrate the many other ceremonies associated with an Afghan wedding. Guests will be limited to 300 and selections of food will be regulated by local government officials to ensure no more than about £3 is spent per person.

Committees would ensure brides are modestly dressed and male and female guests do not mix under a new law

There is an awful lot of flesh on display at Qasre Aros in central Kabul. Arms and shoulders are free to the elements, while necklines plunge daringly low on garish ballgowns made of every shade of synthetic material imaginable and encrusted with fake jewels.

Though the skin may be the orangey plastic of the dozens of mannequins lining the walls, the dresses are worn every night by real Afghan brides.

But the days when brides-to-be would flock to the shops of central Kabul's Shar-e-Now Park may be numbered. Conservative elements of Hamid Karzai's government are pushing for far-reaching restrictions on weddings the likes of which have not been seen since the Taliban regime.

Under a new law proposed by the country's justice ministry and soon to be considered by Karzai's cabinet, "garments contrary to Islamic sharia" will be banned. Those dealing in "outfits that are semi-naked, naked, transparent, or tight in a way that reveals part of the woman's body" will be fined and, if they persist, closed down.

When plans to regulate Afghanistan's booming wedding industry were announced earlier in the year, the government said it merely wanted to curb the country's mania for lavish weddings that drag people into serious debt.

But according to drafts of the law seen by the Guardian, the government is also aiming to introduce various public morality provisions in yet another sign of the casual erosion of the small freedoms women have won since 2001.

And in an echo of the Taliban regime, which used to police weddings to ensure they complied with hardline rulings including a ban on music, the government also intends to set up "committees" to monitor weddings.

The groups, which will include representatives of the religious affairs ministry, will be expected to patrol private ceremonies held in the garish, multistorey wedding halls on the edge of Kabul that light up the night sky with their elaborate neon facades.

Among their duties will be ensuring male and female guests do not mix in the same rooms – already a standard practice in most Afghan weddings – and that the bride is modestly attired.

Muhiuddin Alizada, the owner of Qasre Aros, looked bewildered when he was shown a copy of the draft law for the first time this week.

"This is pointless because the mullahs will not be happy unless the women are wearing burqas," he said. "It is all because of pressure from the Taliban."

Human rights activists are similarly aghast. "A number of experts who have looked at the draft law are of the view that it interferes with private family life and could well be inconsistent with sharia principles and the constitution," said Georgette Gagnon, the UN director of human rights in Afghanistan.

Other shopkeepers were more understanding, even though none of them had a single item of stock that was "sharia compliant".

"We are Muslims and women should dress modestly," said Muhammad Shah, a young entrepreneur whose shop is packed full of brightly coloured dresses that look all the more lurid under the pink fluorescent bulbs of the shop.

But moments later he concluded that there was no way such a law could be enforced.

"Even during the Taliban regimes people were still wearing these types of dresses," said Shah. "Gambling is haram but the government can't even stop that."

Sadia, a 26-year-old who got married on Thursday, was outraged by the idea that the government might try to stop her wearing the white, bare-shouldered glittery creation she chose for her wedding.

"When I'm wearing this dress I feel very beautiful. Why shouldn't I wear it?" she told the Guardian during a four-hour session in a beauty parlour on the morning of her wedding.

"If I don't wear it people will think I have a very bad husband who says I cannot wear these things. This is a day I will remember all my life and every girl is hoping to wear these clothes."

Under the proposed law, not only would she have to be more frumpily attired, she would also have to go for something far cheaper. The government wants to impose a maximum spend on wedding dresses of just over $100.

Alizada says his cheapest frock is $222, a dowdy thing that has been used more than four times. Most brides rent their dresses, paying anything between $200 and $400. If they buy they have to pay more than $1,000.

The law also bans large parties in wedding halls to celebrate the many other ceremonies associated with an Afghan wedding including henna night, engagement, and a post-wedding event known as Takht Jami.

Wedding guests will be limited to 300 and selections of food will be regulated by local government officials to ensure no more than $5 is spent per person.

The erosion of women's freedoms

Afghanistan's restriction on low-cut wedding dresses is the latest government initiative to alarm human rights activists.

Last year the supreme court instructed judges to jail women who run away from home, while another draft regulation sought to transfer the management of women's shelters from charities to the government.

Social conservatives have also been flexing their political muscles in ways rarely noted by local or international media.

Musa Khan, the governor of Ghazni province, once associated with the fundamentalist warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, marked international women's day on 8 March. Unfortunately, he appeared to have missed the point of the event.

According to Alex Dietrich, the head of a US military female engagement team operating in Ghazni, in a morning of speeches, only two women were invited onstage to participate. Instead ranks of burqa-clad women watched a group of men dominate proceedings with speeches on the importance of practising marital obedience.

Khan told them they should not leave their homes without permission from their husbands. "At the end the men sat down for a feast, while the women waited outside in the cold for some of their leftovers," Dietrich said.

This week the deputy governor of Helmand was sacked by President Hamid Karzai after elders objected to a successful concert in the once warring provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, which was attended by 12,000 people. Their objection: some of the female singers performed without headscarves.

We, like many others around the world, mourn the death of Amb. Richard Holbrooke, a towering intellect and force for good who brought peace to the Balkans, among his many other achievements, and whose final mission was to bring lasting stability to Afghanistan and Pakistan. We extend our deepest sympathies to his family and to his many friends and colleagues. -- The Editors of the AfPak Channel.

Event notice: Today at 12:15pm EST in DC, please join the New America Foundation's Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative for a discussion of Nelly Lahoud's new book, The Jihadis' Path to Self-Destruction. Details and RSVP here.

A fallen giant

Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, passed away last night after falling ill on Friday and having surgeries over the weekend to treat a torn aorta (NYT, WSJ, CNN, Tel, AJE, Times, AFP, ABC, LAT, FP, Pajhwok, Tolo). Amb. Holbrooke, 69 and best known for brokering the 1995 Dayton Accords that ended the war in Bosnia, is described variously as a "hard-nosed negotiator who seemed to achieve results by sheer force of will," a "brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter [who] used a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger to press his positions," "one of the preeminent diplomats of his generation," and "a towering, one-of-a-kind presence who helped define American national security strategy over 40 years and three wars by connecting Washington politicians with New York elites and influential figures in capitals worldwide."[[BREAK]]

According to family members, Amb. Holbrooke's last words were to his Pakistani surgeon as he was being sedated for surgery: "You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan" (Post). World leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the U.S., Germany, Sweden, Britain, and others have offered sympathies and remembrances (Post, CNN). One of his Amb. Holbrooke's deputies, Frank Ruggiero, will be filling the post on an acting basis (LAT, FT).

The Afghan war review

U.S. President Barack Obama will make a statement Thursday about the results of his administration's Afghanistan war strategy review (AP, AP). The review is expected to express confidence that Afghanistan's security forces will be able to take the lead by 2014, note progress in areas of Afghanistan, and state concern about Pakistan's efforts to tackle militants in its northwest.

Karen DeYoung discusses the void left by the death of Amb. Holbrooke, who directed the civilian side in the Afghan war strategy, assessing that, "As the glue that held the enterprise together, his absence is likely to increase the already formidable challenge the administration faces" (Post). At least 100 aid workers have been killed in Afghanistan this year, most of whom "worked for aid contractors employed by NATO countries, with fewer victims among traditional nonprofit aid groups," raising questions about whether U.S. counterinsurgency has militarized aid delivery (NYT). 

Yesterday, the Karzai government awarded a "small but potentially path-breaking crude oil contract" for six months from the Angot field in the northern Afghan province of Sar-i-Pol, which could pump roughly 800 barrels a day and return some $1 million a month in revenue (Post).

I quit

The leader of the Islamist party the JUI-F, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, has just announced that he is quitting the ruling coalition government in Pakistan after Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani fired the science and technology minister, Azam Swati, and religious affairs minister Hamid Saeed Kazmi, who had been in a public feud over alleged connections to a corruption scandal involving Hajj pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia arranged by Kazmi's ministry (Dawn, AFP, ET, ET, The News, AP, Dawn, ET, The News). The defection to the opposition leaves the U.S.-allied coalition with a small majority in Pakistan's National Assembly; the next session of parliament begins December 20. Pakistan's education minister Sardar Assef Ahmad Ali and labor minister Syed Khursheed Shah have taken over the religious affairs and information technology portfolios (AFP).

The U.S. consular officer in Peshawar, Elizabeth Rood, has reportedly refused to serve in Pakistan any longer after being threatened by Taliban militants (ToI, Geo). Three people, including two Afghans, were killed earlier today when gunmen opened fire on the Ghazi Baba shrine in Peshawar (Dawn, Pajhwok). And a suspected U.S. drone strike was reported in North Waziristan earlier this morning (AP, Geo, ET/AFP).

New career options

A $2 million vocational center, for men and women to study tailoring, plumbing, and car repair and funded by the Iranian government, has been inaugurated in the western Afghan province of Herat (Pajhwok). Iran is funding similar centers in Kandahar, Nimroz, and Farah.

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Along with troops, the UK is pouring aid into Afghanistan. But is it working? Jonathan Steele gets a first hand view of life inside Helmand province

Imagine a two-mile journey from Britain's military HQ in Helmand to the shooting range where Afghan police train under UK supervision. Lashkar Gah, Helmand's provincial capital, has hosted British troops for more than four years, so you might think the trip would be an easy commute.

Think again. Wedged into flak jackets with helmets at the ready, Guardian photographer Sean Smith and I sit in the front vehicle of a three-car convoy of armour-plated land cruisers with darkened windows driven by weapon-carrying security guards. The armoured glass in the front passenger's window sports an ominous perforated crack like a star burst. "I see you've taken at least one bullet," I comment after one of the guards finishes briefing us on how to operate the two-way radio in case he and his colleague are incapacitated.

"Actually, it was just a stone," he replies. "Small boys throw them. They take time to aim, so it's better to be in the lead vehicle. You usually get past before they're ready." As we set off on our 10-minute trip he picks up his handset to launch into a running commentary of potential threats for the benefit of the cars behind. "Static tuctuc [three-wheeler] on right. White Toyota, no licence plate, approaching from side road. Multiple pax [passengers]. Tuctuc on left, has eyes on us. No pax . . ."

It's our first morning in Lashkar Gah and I wasn't expecting this. Yes, the 18-minute helicopter ride from the huge transit airfield at Camp Bastion in northern Helmand had ended with swerves and tilts at little more than 15m (50ft) above Afghan family compounds before we reached Lashkar Gah. But I had thought the town itself might be safe.

We reach the shooting range. In light blue, knee-length coats and trousers, the women police look very smart, but what is most striking is the head gear – scarves covering the chin as well as the hair, and wraparound reflective sunglasses, giving them a totally anonymous, ninja-like appearance.

Piles of folded-up burqas lie on the bench beside them where we enjoy soft drinks before they take up the new pistols two British police trainers have brought. "Lashkar Gah has 16 policewomen but only three are willing to wear their uniforms to work," Roshan Zakia, the senior officer, explains. The Taliban sometimes attack people seen as collaborating with the government of Hamid Karzai and foreign forces.

Zakia is one of those who does not hide her job. Three men came to her door recently and beat her up until neighbours saved her. It was not the only case of intimidation we were to hear during our 10-day stay in Helmand.

But it is not easy to report my impressions of Helmand's challenges. I was invited by our own Department for International Development (DFID), but everything I write has to be submitted to the Ministry of Defence and cleared for publication. Britain is trying to bring good governance to the people of Afghanistan, among which I thought was respect for press freedom. But no journalist can travel with the British in Helmand if he or she has not given signed agreement to an annex to the MoD "Green Book" which sets out the procedures for coverage, including the requirement for pre-publication approval of all text, audio, and pictures. A soldier even sits in on my interviews. No wonder American journalists decline to report on the British in Helmand. Their own government makes no such demands of the embedded press. Astonishingly, I learn the Newspaper Publishers Association, the National Union of Journalists, the Society of Editors and the BBC were consulted in producing the Green Book.

A policy that aims to bring services to ordinary people within weeks of the military's advances

The last was strange, given that both the British and Americans can point to progress. Their counter-insurgency strategy of "shape, clear, hold, build, and transfer" aims to bring services to ordinary people within weeks, if not days of the military's advances. Before troops go into an area, the plan is to have a "district delivery package" geared up and ready to follow. Install a district governor and key officials, set up a community council, offer cash-for-work programmes, open health clinics and schools, appoint officials to handle local disputes and get police, judges and prosecutors in place to deal with crime.

Eleven of Helmand's 14 districts now have a governor and some officials, compared with only five two years ago. Schools have reopened with almost 80,000 children enrolled today, virtually double the number of 2007. Police are being trained at the rate of 150 new recruits every month.

British and US forces are trying to pave the way for economic development by removing IEDs, patrolling the main roads and making it possible for bazaars to reopen and commerce to revive. DFID is funding a programme to give farmers wheat seed to replace poppy production. Loans are going to small businesses.

The schemes are supervised by the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Lashkar Gah, a mixed civilian and military enterprise. The US now has more troops in Helmand than Britain, but the PRT is still a UK-run affair of some 150 people, with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the MoD, and DFID all represented. The number includes a growing presence of US civilians, plus some from Denmark.

They live inside a heavily fortified compound of watchtowers, tents and air-conditioned trailers that also houses Task Force Helmand, the UK military headquarters. Overland travel for civilians is confined to armed convoys of the kind that took us to the police shooting range. Travel to any of Helmand's district centres is by helicopter only.

Claims that UK and US forces – and through them the Afghan government – now control most of Helmand are exaggerated. Until you visit the area, it is hard to envisage that their presence is actually confined to a few towns in this rural province. They sit in a series of security bubbles labelled "main bases", "forward operating bases" and "patrol bases", each of diminishing size, with the patrol bases home to anything from a dozen to 100 troops. The latest tactic is to set up "line of sight" checkpoints, mainly manned by Afghan police, on the roads between towns so that travellers are always watched. Local government offices are also located in guarded compounds where, for safety reasons, officials often live as well as work.

PRT officials and military spokesmen use various phrases to define success. The government has "extended its reach", or "can now exert influence" or "has a presence" in this or that new district. Every press release makes the same point. The unspoken assumptions are that they are playing a zero-sum game and territory won from the Taliban is territory denied to them. But this is asymmetric warfare and those Taliban – the majority – who are local farmers usually disperse before major operations begin. They pursue the struggle by other means: IEDs and rifle fire from ambush positions; intimidating government officials with assassinations; and "night letters" warning them of the risk of working with foreigners, just as the mujahideen did when Soviet troops were in Helmand 30 years ago.

The latest resistance pinprick seems to be the stoning of Afghan government and foreign vehicles. One day I sat in on an hour-long "Pashtu for Beginners" class for British troops. Offering language tips is an intelligent move and attendance was impressive. On a blisteringly hot afternoon almost 15 young men turned up, perhaps aided by the fact that their instructor, a fellow soldier in combat fatigues, was a pretty blonde. After we had rehearsed several standard phrases – How are you?, I'm not an enemy, I'm a British soldier – one squaddie asked: "What's the Pashtu for 'Stop throwing stones at us'?"

We had a more graphic illustration of the point on a visit to a girls' high school in Lashkar Gah. The school also teaches boys up to the age of 12. Dozens were racing round as our armoured convoy parked under the playground's only trees beyond a sign saying that USAID had helped to rebuild the school. Twenty minutes into my interview with the deputy head, a security guard came in and warned us that we might have to leave soon. Boys were starting to stone the land cruisers. He rushed back five minutes later and ordered us to don our helmets and run to the cars, which the guards had managed to move closer to the building. We beat a hasty retreat while the kids carried on stoning as the convoy moved off.

The stoning may have been spontaneous, but a source told us the widespread scale of it was new and appeared to be a tactic organised by the Taliban. On the local radio stations that they have set up, the British and Americans put out messages urging Afghans not to let their children help the Taliban.

Most Helmandis live in the province's fertile central area along the Helmand river and the adjacent irrigation canals. Expatriates call it the "green zone" because of the stark contrast with the khaki desert. But the name is also a reminder of Baghdad's Green Zone, where many of them did earlier service. The hallmarks of foreigners' lives in both places are insecurity and isolation from ordinary people.

Talking to Helmandis in the green zone's villages is as impossible for embedded journalists as it is for PRT officials and UK troops. But we asked to meet Afghan NGOs, though we knew conversation would be limited while a soldier sat beside us. The request ran into problems. "They won't come to the PRT and they don't want to have vehicles from the PRT coming to their offices," we were told.

The PRT's Afghan interpreters live in the compound and even they are afraid to go into Lashkar Gah when off duty in case of reprisals. They come mainly from Kabul, and on the job some wear baseball caps and scarves round their faces to avoid identification.

A survey found that the government's justice system was trusted by just 7% of Afghans

The survey found that many people are satisfied with the security and justice the Taliban provide. More than half the male respondents called them "completely trustworthy and fair". They did not demand bribes, though they took money in other ways, through taxes on farm crops, road tolls and zakat (donations for the poor). Women were far less positive, with only a quarter saying they trusted the Taliban.

The government justice system was heavily criticised for bribery and favouritism and was trusted by only 7% of men and women. "Most ordinary people associate the government with practices and behaviours they dislike: the inability to provide security, dependence on foreign military, eradication of a basic livelihood crop (poppy), and as having a history of partisanship (the perceived preferential treatment of northerners)", the survey reported.

To counter people's adverse perceptions of the government the rule of law team in the PRT is working with Afghan officials to build up a reformed justice system. It is part of what is called the Helmand Institutions Building Programme. They took us to Nad Ali, a district centre they consider a showcase and model for other centres to follow as they capture them from the Taliban. Here, too, insecurity was massive. Although Nad Ali is only 15km (9 miles) from Lashkar Gah, travel was by helicopter. Kicking up clouds of dust, we landed in a medieval compound of ancient mud-brick walls, now known as FOB Shawqat. Until the British arrived it was the town's livestock market, transformed now into a rectangular fortress of three tiers of Hesco barriers (wired sacks full of loose stones and other ballast), freight containers, tents, and camouflaged watchtowers.

Two weeks before our visit, the Taliban launched a two-hour attack on one of the watchtowers. Troops are warned that the risks of direct fire and suicide attacks on Shawqat are "substantial". Under heavy guard we were allowed to walk 45m from the base to a new bazaar built by the British for a ribbon-cutting ceremony by Habibullah, the district governor. But when we went to his office later, 180m away, it was in armoured vehicles. They also insisted this was necessary when they took us on a trip to the old bazaar, where we were allowed to dismount and walk around for stilted interviews with shopkeepers.

In the governor's offices, we met three newly appointed officials – a judge, prosecutor and investigator. The latter two told us they had started making trips to villages to explain their work but had only held two trials since August. They face a long road ahead.

The longest road of all is the effort to improve life for Helmand's women. After toppling the Taliban, George Bush and Tony Blair encouraged their wives to proclaim the arrival of a new dawn for Afghan women; liberation from the burqa and the chance for education again. The number of girls in school has become one of the regularly repeated measures of change.

Progress is substantial but what happens when girls leave school? Where are the jobs, and what are British and US aid programmes doing to encourage female employment? Are they taking steps to deal with some of the grim justice issues that women raised in the DFID-sponsored survey? Women complained of domestic violence, multiple marriages, honour killing and the archaic practice known as bad, under which young girls are given to other families in exchange for unpaid debts or as compensation if someone from the other family has been killed.

PRT officials arranged for us to see a group of women in Lashkar Gah. We meet in the Department of Women's Affairs, the only neutral venue they consider safe. About a dozen turn up. Their overriding concern is jobs: in conservative Pashtun society, many husbands refuse to let their wives go out of the house or family compound and if they do permit them, there are few jobs for women apart from teaching.

At the girls' high school, Rahela Safi, the deputy headteacher, said almost 10,000 girls were enrolled. They study for only two or three hours a day because teachers have to do three shifts. Some girls are in their early 20s, having missed out during the Taliban period. But though they study subjects from maths to biology and computer sciences, most end up – if they find a job at all – teaching the next generation of girls.

The provincial education department in Lashkar Gah has 70 employees. All are men. Money is being allocated to set up a women's education unit, which will be staffed by women, though again it will only be women working with and for women. The PRT itself employs no women interpreters. When I raised this, a (female) British civilian adviser suggested the question was culturally insensitive since it assumed there were women available who had language skills and permission from their families to work alongside men. To which one reply might be that the PRT could get the facts by advertising on the radio in Kabul or Lashkar Gah and seeing what response they receive.

The provincial council in Lashkar Gah has three women, but only one of Helmand's district community councils, selected by local elders under UK and US supervision and financed by the US and the UK, has women representatives.

Washington and London seem happy to try to alter Afghan culture when it comes to the economy, but when that culture undermines women's rights, there is less energy. "Is it our goal to change Afghan society or deliver basic services and security and make it able to have a representative government?" asks Arthur Snell, a Foreign Office man who serves as the PRT's deputy head. "It would play into the Taliban's hands if they could say the foreigners are here to undermine Afghan traditional society. You have to strike a careful balance."

An aid programme that will take years to deliver comprehensive results

First of all, it must be said it has come very late. "The key moment was the summer of 2008 with the decision to develop the districts outside Lashkar Gah," says Nick Abbott, head of DFID's Afghanistan team. But why wasn't this done in the spring of 2002 as soon as the Taliban were toppled? Remember Blair's boast that Britain would not walk away from Afghanistan? In the wake of Bush's rush to topple Saddam Hussein, he promptly did. This allowed the Taliban to recover and re-emerge, using the argument that the latest foreign occupiers had brought no benefit to ordinary people in the Pashtun heartlands.

Second, the aid programme will take years to deliver comprehensive results. Schools and health clinics can be built relatively quickly but giving people justice, honest police and officials who observe the rule of law – the issues on which the Taliban are seen as strong – will need much more time.

Third, it raises the question of the high cost of delivering aid in a war zone, given the huge danger facing foreigners who provide and try to monitor it. The same money would go much further if spent in needy developing countries that are at peace. Aid could return to Afghanistan once Afghans have settled their conflicts. Yet DFID is going in the opposite direction by planning to increase its spending in Helmand and the rest of Afghanistan next year.

Fourth, aid as counter-insurgency endangers the work – and lives – of independent NGOs by linking them with foreign forces in people's minds, a point frequently made by groups such as Oxfam as well as Afghan NGOs. While foreign governments' aid goes up, charitable aid diminishes.

Fifth, does aid really enhance the legitimacy of Afghan government representatives in Helmand? Under US counter-insurgency doctrine (Coin), which Britain endorses, "government-in-a-box" is supposed to drop in as soon as troops flood into an area and force the Taliban underground. The difficulty is that the US and UK do not choose the officials who arrive to fly the government flag, since the Karzai regime is supposed to be sovereign.

Much of the British and US effort in Helmand this year has gone on preventing a former provincial governor, Sher Mohammad Akhunzada, and a former police chief, Abdul Rahman Jan, from continuing to exert influence locally. On suspicion of corruption, the British persuaded Karzai to remove them four years ago, so they were furious when a delegation of Kabul ministers brought both men to a meeting of local elders in Nad Ali in February. Diplomats say Akhunzada, now a senator in Kabul, "still enjoys direct access to Karzai".

Less senior officials are also a concern. Officials who served in the PRT earlier this year say they believe several members of current Helmand governor Gulabuddin Mangal's team diverted British funds from a programme to get farmers to plant crops other than poppies. They bought low-quality wheat seeds and fertiliser in place of what they were supposed to give farmers, and pocketed the difference. The lists of beneficiaries were also said to have been rigged in favour of friends of Mangal's staff. When the British complained, the governor mobilised the National Directorate of Security and several staff were arrested.

Sixth, does aid undermine the Taliban? Most Taliban commanders seem to recognise that people want schools and health clinics and it is counterproductive to destroy them. In some places, they have even tried to get credit by saying their presence forces the foreigners to pay to build them. "There is huge pressure in newly cleared areas to open schools and we only do it with buy-in from the local population. The Taliban haven't been active in attacking schools. There have been no attacks on girls' schools in Lashkar Gah since 2005. There was one in Gereshk in April this year," says Brett Rapley, the PRT's education adviser.

Health clinics have also largely been spared. "Before I came here," says Dr Jonathan Cox, the PRT medical adviser who is a colonel in the regular army, "I thought the Taliban would be burning clinics down. That's not the case. They seem not to burn them down or blow them up. They don't even do it to clinics we've built."

"Women teachers who live in Taliban-influenced areas outside the security bubble and come in to work are sometimes intimidated," says Rapley. Medical staff appear to be better off. "There is surprisingly little intimidation of health and clinic workers in lonely places. If it's a local [as opposed to an out-of-area or foreign] insurgent, he must know his family must be using that clinic and when the war is over he will need one himself," says Cox.

Coin's key test is whether Taliban members are giving up. General David Petraeus, the US commander of foreign troops in Afghanistan, has stepped up the use of drones and special forces to assassinate Taliban commanders, claiming substantial success. But critics say the supply of new Taliban is inexhaustible and new commanders may be more ruthless than those they replace.

If one aim is to frighten the Taliban into dropping their guns, the carrot is the "re-integration" programme, rolled out this year, which offers Taliban benefits for a return to civilian life. PRT officials in Helmand decline to give figures on how many have come forward but suggest it is only "dozens". There can be a problem if former Taliban get jobs or vocational training while there are no rewards for other Afghans in Helmand or more peaceful provinces.

Amnesty is also a difficult issue. Should a Taliban member who has killed Afghans or foreign troops escape retribution? If not, what of the anomaly that the Afghan government and parliament are full of men with blood on their hands from earlier phases in the country's three decades of war? And why would Taliban commanders give up if they know they're going straight to jail?

In Lashkar Gah, they showed us the DFID-funded new Afghan prison. Until September last year the old building was in chaos, controlled by its own inmates. The new one has carpeted cells where inmates sleep on two-tiered bunks or the floor. The Afghan governor, a jovial figure in vest and tracksuit, put his arms round inmates in avuncular style. One wing housed former Taliban, I was told. They let me select four to interview on why they had switched sides, but all denied any link with the movement.

A survey commissioned by DFID last year examined why Afghans join the Taliban and the other insurgent group, Hezb-i Islami, and how much local people support them. They interviewed 192 people in Kandahar, Wardak and around Kabul (but for security reasons not in Helmand). Only 10 supported the government. The rest saw it as corrupt and partisan. Most supported the Taliban, at least what they called the "good Taliban", defined as those who showed religious piety, attacked foreign forces but not Afghans and delivered justice quickly and fairly. They did not like "Pakistani Taliban" and Taliban linked to narcotics. But support for the "good Taliban" was expressed with no enthusiasm and mainly, it seemed, because of a lack of alternatives.

Few respondents said they understood why foreign forces were in Afghanistan. The majority wanted a lifting of UN sanctions on senior Taliban so the government could get them back into Afghan political life and negotiate a withdrawal of foreign forces. Older respondents said this should be gradual to avoid another collapse into civil war as happened when Soviet forces left.

The latest DFID-funded survey in April and May this year interviewed 450 people in various districts of Helmand as well as Kandahar, Kunduz and Nangarhar. They included pro-government people, others who were sympathetic to, or members of, armed groups, and fence-sitters. They were asked if they supported re-integration, whether it was feasible and how it linked to "reconciliation" (negotiations with Taliban leaders). Only two opposed it. The vast majority said re-integration at the local level would only work if combined with reconciliation at the top. The process would be long, they thought, but should start soon. Many repeated the earlier survey's point that foreign forces should not leave completely until there was agreement with the Taliban so as to avoid a relapse into civil war.

Full marks to DFID for commissioning these surveys, though officials may be disappointed that respondents had little to say for development aid. "There is no evidence from this study . . . that providing basic services in insurgency areas wins hearts and minds particularly if they are protected by foreign forces," last year's survey concluded. It is a powerful point, and nothing they showed me in Helmand disproved it.

Thank you for inviting me to speak at the opening of your 2010 Annual Council. It is a great pleasure to be back again this year.

I'd like to acknowledge your national executive committee and your national president Robin Klitscher. Robin has done an excellent job in his role as president since 2007.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank all Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association members for the good work you do in our communities, and on behalf of veterans.

The RSA is a well respected and trusted institution in New Zealand. You play a vital role, advocating for veterans and keeping alive the memory of their sacrifices and their contributions.

Thank you for all that you do.

As Prime Minister I have had the privilege of meeting many veterans and hearing their remarkable stories.

You are an inspiration to us all, and I know I speak on behalf of New Zealanders when I say how much we value the contribution you have made to our peace and our security, our prosperity and our future. 

You will always hold a very special place in our nation's history, and the National-led Government is committed to honouring the sacrifices you have made.  

Today I'd like to talk about some of the Government's initiatives that will be of interest to you.

But first, I'd like to reflect on some commemorative events I've been involved in recently.

Commemorations

In April I went to Turkey for the 95^th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

This was my first trip to Gallipoli, and it was an extremely moving experience.

The Gallipoli campaign is a deeply significant part of our history, and that history comes alive when you stand at places like Quinn's Post and the summit of Chunuk Bair.

In 1915, our forebears in the armed services landed at Gallipoli, thousands of miles from their homes and families.

More than 2700 New Zealanders did not return home. Thousands more were wounded. I cannot begin to imagine the suffering, hardships, and horrors they endured.

It was humbling to be in Gallipoli this year to mark their courage and sacrifice.

I was proud to be accompanied by 22 veterans of subsequent wars as well as a group of 21 young New Zealanders.

The Ministry of Culture and Heritage is currently planning commemorations for 2015 - which will mark the 100^th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

Although it's too soon to provide a definitive list of events, 2015 will be an important commemorative year for New Zealand and many countries around the world.

A major project to mark the First World War centenary will be the development of a memorial precinct around the National War Memorial here in Wellington. This is due to be completed in time for the centenary celebrations.

This year I also had the opportunity to visit Korea for the 60^th anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

I went to the War Memorial in Yongsan, Seoul, for a wreath laying ceremony in tribute to New Zealanders who lost their lives in the conflict.

Like Gallipoli, it was a very moving experience, and I salute those of you who served in that war.

This year New Zealand also marked Merchant Navy Day for the first time.

I hope the annual commemorations on September 3 will continue to raise awareness of the invaluable contribution made by the Merchant Navy in both world wars.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which more than 2700 New Zealand soldiers were killed, declared missing in action, or wounded.

More New Zealanders died on that single day in 1917 than in any other day in our history.

This was a terrible loss for our country and we will never forget the incredible sacrifice by these soldiers on the 12^th of October, 93 years ago.

Commemorations are very important for veterans, their families and friends, and for fellow Kiwis.

They help keep the stories and spirit of our valued veterans alive. 

New Zealand Defence Service Medal

Another way to remember and recognise those who have served is by the awarding of medals. 

The RSA has proposed a defence service medal for many years, and National has supported this idea.

We set up a working group last year to consider the medal and its eligibility criteria, under the direction of an independent chair, Neil Walter.

The working group reported back late last year and I am pleased to update you on our progress. 

I am delighted to announce today that the Government has established the New Zealand Defence Service Medal, subject to the Queen's approval.

Cabinet has also approved an additional $3.85 million for the manufacture and distribution of the medal.

The medal is for those who have served in the military for more than three years since World War Two, and those who did compulsory military training or national military service.

This is a fantastic way to give our servicemen and women the recognition they deserve.

It is estimated that there are more than 160,000 people eligible for the medal.

The initial call for applications will be restricted to those aged 50 years and over, but after six to 12 months we will open it up to all others.

In cases where an ex-serviceman or woman is deceased, their family can apply for the medal.

We hope that applications will open early next year, and that the first batch of medals will be delivered soon after.  

Defence policy

Today I'd also like to update you on the Government's defence policy.

As you know, the Government is conducting a defence review.

Our Defence White Paper is on track to be released soon and I want to thank the RSA for your contribution to this.

The White Paper will be a blueprint of the future strategic and defence challenges for New Zealand, and the type of defence force we will need to face them. 

It will make sure that the New Zealand Defence Force has what it needs to protect New Zealanders and New Zealand's interests well beyond 2020.

It's important for us to take the time to make the right decisions.

We've consulted with a lot of people, including the public and a panel of independent experts.

We've also undertaken a comprehensive value for money review because we want to get the most out of our defence budget, and put as many resources as possible into the frontline.

Because it's our troops that matter most of all.

And they are doing a fantastic job at home and abroad.

Just last month we saw the Defence Force step up to help Canterbury after the devastating earthquake.

And at present, New Zealand forces are proudly representing us in Timor Leste, the Middle East, Sinai, Iraq, the Solomon Islands, Korea, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan

In May this year I had the privilege of visiting our troops in Afghanistan.

It was good to spend some time with our servicemen and women in Kabul and Bamiyan.

They're doing a great job, helping to build schools and hospitals, protecting the Afghan people, and restoring security to the region.

I enjoyed visiting the bazaar in Bamiyan and meeting some of the locals.

It was clear to me that the people there are very grateful for the support of our troops.

I was also struck by the camaraderie, commitment, and courage on display by our servicemen and women.

You can be really proud of them and the work that they are doing.

They are continuing in the spirit and traditions that you, and those before you, have left.

And I know that they do this wherever they are sent.

In August New Zealand lost a fine young officer in action in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Timothy O'Donnell.

Tim was a man who exemplified the Defence Force's values of courage, commitment, comradeship, and integrity.

His death was a stark reminder that when our servicemen and women leave home to serve overseas it comes with very real risks.

But when I was in Afghanistan I saw first hand that our men and women are making a real difference.

I'd like to take this opportunity to pay my respects to all our troops serving us so proudly in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.

Veterans' affairs

Now I'll touch on a few of the National-led Government's initiatives that may be of interest to you.

This Government has made good progress in the area of veterans' affairs and I'd like to acknowledge the hard work of Minister Judith Collins.

The Law Commission report into the review of the War Pensions Act was tabled at Parliament in June. It contains 170 recommendations on changes to the war pension scheme.

The Government is considering the report at the moment and will make an announcement in due course. This is a large report and it is important that we work through it carefully and take the time to ensure that we get it right.

You will also be aware of our work to increase engagement between the Government and veterans.

Veterans' Affairs New Zealand started Case Management in the Community last year.

Under this initiative, case managers travel throughout New Zealand to hold events with groups of veterans. There are four a month.

It's a chance for veterans to share their views and get information on what support is available.

I'm pleased to report that the initiative has been very successful so far and has had good attendance.

It's important that veterans can express their views directly to the government.

That is something the RSA has strongly advocated for, and the case management initiative is one way to make sure that happens.

Since your last annual council we have also changed travel concessions for severely disabled war veterans.

Our changes bring fairness and certainty back into the system.

As you will know, Cabinet considered a number of options and decided to make changes which reflected the proposal made by the RSA.

We really appreciate your input into veterans' affairs issues such as this, and we hope this will continue.

Wider government policy

I'd like to finish today by sharing my thoughts on New Zealand's future prospects.

This Government is intent on ensuring this is a country where your children and grandchildren are able to enjoy the quality of life that you and our forebears were prepared to fight for.

To that end, the Government is firmly focused on lifting the long term performance of New Zealand's economy.

That's the only way we will create jobs, boost incomes, raising living standards, and provide the world-class public services New Zealanders deserve.

Our October 1 tax changes are an important part of our plan to grow the economy.

We've cut all personal income tax rates, GST has increased to 15 per cent, and we've boosted New Zealand Super, Working For Families, and benefit payments by 2.02 per cent to compensate for the rise in GST. That includes the Veteran's Pension.

The tax package leaves the vast majority of New Zealanders better off.

It's worth nothing that since mid-2008, thanks to tax cuts and other adjustments, New Zealand Super and Veteran's Pension payments have increased significantly.

The rate for a married couple has risen from $439.80 for each person a fortnight to $511.06 after 1 October. That's an increase of $142.52 a fortnight per couple - a 16 per cent boost in just over two years.

We're also relentlessly focused on providing better public services in areas such as health, education, and law and order.

In health, more patients are getting the elective operations they need than ever before. That includes the likes of hip replacements, cataract removals, and ear, nose, and throat surgery.

In law and order, we are putting victims first, getting tough on criminals, and addressing the drivers of crime. We've put more police on the street, made sentences tougher, and strengthened bail laws.

In education, we've implemented National Standards to make sure our young people are getting the reading, writing, and maths skills they need to succeed.

We're also expanding the successful Limited Service Volunteer programme for 17- to 24-year-olds. This programme is a six-week military-style camp, supported by life skills courses.

We've had fantastic feedback on the LSV programme. Many graduates go on to study, get a job, or join the armed forces.

These initiatives are just a snapshot of the work we are doing to secure a brighter future for New Zealanders.

Ladies and gentlemen.

We will never forget the New Zealanders who gave their lives in the service of their country.

We will never forget the sacrifice that all veterans have made for a peaceful, secure, and prosperous world.

And we will never forget those who are proudly serving us today.

This Government remains committed to honouring your contributions.

Thank you to all members of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association for the invaluable job you do.

I wish you all the best for a successful 2010 Annual Council.

Thank you for inviting me to speak at the opening of your 2010 Annual Council. It is a great pleasure to be back again this year.

I'd like to acknowledge your national executive committee and your national president Robin Klitscher. Robin has done an excellent job in his role as president since 2007.

I'd also like to take this opportunity to thank all Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association members for the good work you do in our communities, and on behalf of veterans.

The RSA is a well respected and trusted institution in New Zealand. You play a vital role, advocating for veterans and keeping alive the memory of their sacrifices and their contributions.

Thank you for all that you do.

As Prime Minister I have had the privilege of meeting many veterans and hearing their remarkable stories.

You are an inspiration to us all, and I know I speak on behalf of New Zealanders when I say how much we value the contribution you have made to our peace and our security, our prosperity and our future. 

You will always hold a very special place in our nation's history, and the National-led Government is committed to honouring the sacrifices you have made.  

Today I'd like to talk about some of the Government's initiatives that will be of interest to you.

But first, I'd like to reflect on some commemorative events I've been involved in recently.

Commemorations

In April I went to Turkey for the 95^th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

This was my first trip to Gallipoli, and it was an extremely moving experience.

The Gallipoli campaign is a deeply significant part of our history, and that history comes alive when you stand at places like Quinn's Post and the summit of Chunuk Bair.

In 1915, our forebears in the armed services landed at Gallipoli, thousands of miles from their homes and families.

More than 2700 New Zealanders did not return home. Thousands more were wounded. I cannot begin to imagine the suffering, hardships, and horrors they endured.

It was humbling to be in Gallipoli this year to mark their courage and sacrifice.

I was proud to be accompanied by 22 veterans of subsequent wars as well as a group of 21 young New Zealanders.

The Ministry of Culture and Heritage is currently planning commemorations for 2015 - which will mark the 100^th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings.

Although it's too soon to provide a definitive list of events, 2015 will be an important commemorative year for New Zealand and many countries around the world.

A major project to mark the First World War centenary will be the development of a memorial precinct around the National War Memorial here in Wellington. This is due to be completed in time for the centenary celebrations.

This year I also had the opportunity to visit Korea for the 60^th anniversary of the start of the Korean War.

I went to the War Memorial in Yongsan, Seoul, for a wreath laying ceremony in tribute to New Zealanders who lost their lives in the conflict.

Like Gallipoli, it was a very moving experience, and I salute those of you who served in that war.

This year New Zealand also marked Merchant Navy Day for the first time.

I hope the annual commemorations on September 3 will continue to raise awareness of the invaluable contribution made by the Merchant Navy in both world wars.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which more than 2700 New Zealand soldiers were killed, declared missing in action, or wounded.

More New Zealanders died on that single day in 1917 than in any other day in our history.

This was a terrible loss for our country and we will never forget the incredible sacrifice by these soldiers on the 12^th of October, 93 years ago.

Commemorations are very important for veterans, their families and friends, and for fellow Kiwis.

They help keep the stories and spirit of our valued veterans alive. 

New Zealand Defence Service Medal

Another way to remember and recognise those who have served is by the awarding of medals. 

The RSA has proposed a defence service medal for many years, and National has supported this idea.

We set up a working group last year to consider the medal and its eligibility criteria, under the direction of an independent chair, Neil Walter.

The working group reported back late last year and I am pleased to update you on our progress. 

I am delighted to announce today that the Government has established the New Zealand Defence Service Medal, subject to the Queen's approval.

Cabinet has also approved an additional $3.85 million for the manufacture and distribution of the medal.

The medal is for those who have served in the military for more than three years since World War Two, and those who did compulsory military training or national military service.

This is a fantastic way to give our servicemen and women the recognition they deserve.

It is estimated that there are more than 160,000 people eligible for the medal.

The initial call for applications will be restricted to those aged 50 years and over, but after six to 12 months we will open it up to all others.

In cases where an ex-serviceman or woman is deceased, their family can apply for the medal.

We hope that applications will open early next year, and that the first batch of medals will be delivered soon after.  

Defence policy

Today I'd also like to update you on the Government's defence policy.

As you know, the Government is conducting a defence review.

Our Defence White Paper is on track to be released soon and I want to thank the RSA for your contribution to this.

The White Paper will be a blueprint of the future strategic and defence challenges for New Zealand, and the type of defence force we will need to face them. 

It will make sure that the New Zealand Defence Force has what it needs to protect New Zealanders and New Zealand's interests well beyond 2020.

It's important for us to take the time to make the right decisions.

We've consulted with a lot of people, including the public and a panel of independent experts.

We've also undertaken a comprehensive value for money review because we want to get the most out of our defence budget, and put as many resources as possible into the frontline.

Because it's our troops that matter most of all.

And they are doing a fantastic job at home and abroad.

Just last month we saw the Defence Force step up to help Canterbury after the devastating earthquake.

And at present, New Zealand forces are proudly representing us in Timor Leste, the Middle East, Sinai, Iraq, the Solomon Islands, Korea, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan

In May this year I had the privilege of visiting our troops in Afghanistan.

It was good to spend some time with our servicemen and women in Kabul and Bamiyan.

They're doing a great job, helping to build schools and hospitals, protecting the Afghan people, and restoring security to the region.

I enjoyed visiting the bazaar in Bamiyan and meeting some of the locals.

It was clear to me that the people there are very grateful for the support of our troops.

I was also struck by the camaraderie, commitment, and courage on display by our servicemen and women.

You can be really proud of them and the work that they are doing.

They are continuing in the spirit and traditions that you, and those before you, have left.

And I know that they do this wherever they are sent.

In August New Zealand lost a fine young officer in action in Afghanistan, Lieutenant Timothy O'Donnell.

Tim was a man who exemplified the Defence Force's values of courage, commitment, comradeship, and integrity.

His death was a stark reminder that when our servicemen and women leave home to serve overseas it comes with very real risks.

But when I was in Afghanistan I saw first hand that our men and women are making a real difference.

I'd like to take this opportunity to pay my respects to all our troops serving us so proudly in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.

Veterans' affairs

Now I'll touch on a few of the National-led Government's initiatives that may be of interest to you.

This Government has made good progress in the area of veterans' affairs and I'd like to acknowledge the hard work of Minister Judith Collins.

The Law Commission report into the review of the War Pensions Act was tabled at Parliament in June. It contains 170 recommendations on changes to the war pension scheme.

The Government is considering the report at the moment and will make an announcement in due course. This is a large report and it is important that we work through it carefully and take the time to ensure that we get it right.

You will also be aware of our work to increase engagement between the Government and veterans.

Veterans' Affairs New Zealand started Case Management in the Community last year.

Under this initiative, case managers travel throughout New Zealand to hold events with groups of veterans. There are four a month.

It's a chance for veterans to share their views and get information on what support is available.

I'm pleased to report that the initiative has been very successful so far and has had good attendance.

It's important that veterans can express their views directly to the government.

That is something the RSA has strongly advocated for, and the case management initiative is one way to make sure that happens.

Since your last annual council we have also changed travel concessions for severely disabled war veterans.

Our changes bring fairness and certainty back into the system.

As you will know, Cabinet considered a number of options and decided to make changes which reflected the proposal made by the RSA.

We really appreciate your input into veterans' affairs issues such as this, and we hope this will continue.

Wider government policy

I'd like to finish today by sharing my thoughts on New Zealand's future prospects.

This Government is intent on ensuring this is a country where your children and grandchildren are able to enjoy the quality of life that you and our forebears were prepared to fight for.

To that end, the Government is firmly focused on lifting the long term performance of New Zealand's economy.

That's the only way we will create jobs, boost incomes, raising living standards, and provide the world-class public services New Zealanders deserve.

Our October 1 tax changes are an important part of our plan to grow the economy.

We've cut all personal income tax rates, GST has increased to 15 per cent, and we've boosted New Zealand Super, Working For Families, and benefit payments by 2.02 per cent to compensate for the rise in GST. That includes the Veteran's Pension.

The tax package leaves the vast majority of New Zealanders better off.

It's worth nothing that since mid-2008, thanks to tax cuts and other adjustments, New Zealand Super and Veteran's Pension payments have increased significantly.

The rate for a married couple has risen from $439.80 for each person a fortnight to $511.06 after 1 October. That's an increase of $142.52 a fortnight per couple - a 16 per cent boost in just over two years.

We're also relentlessly focused on providing better public services in areas such as health, education, and law and order.

In health, more patients are getting the elective operations they need than ever before. That includes the likes of hip replacements, cataract removals, and ear, nose, and throat surgery.

In law and order, we are putting victims first, getting tough on criminals, and addressing the drivers of crime. We've put more police on the street, made sentences tougher, and strengthened bail laws.

In education, we've implemented National Standards to make sure our young people are getting the reading, writing, and maths skills they need to succeed.

We're also expanding the successful Limited Service Volunteer programme for 17- to 24-year-olds. This programme is a six-week military-style camp, supported by life skills courses.

We've had fantastic feedback on the LSV programme. Many graduates go on to study, get a job, or join the armed forces.

These initiatives are just a snapshot of the work we are doing to secure a brighter future for New Zealanders.

Ladies and gentlemen.

We will never forget the New Zealanders who gave their lives in the service of their country.

We will never forget the sacrifice that all veterans have made for a peaceful, secure, and prosperous world.

And we will never forget those who are proudly serving us today.

This Government remains committed to honouring your contributions.

Thank you to all members of the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association for the invaluable job you do.

I wish you all the best for a successful 2010 Annual Council.

The Foreign Minister of Afghanistan Zalmay Rassoul calling on the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in New Delhi on August 24, 2010.

Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rassuol arrived here today on a three-day visit during which he will hold extensive talks with External Affairs Minister S M Krishna on bilateral relations as well as other issues of mutual interest.

Mr Rassuol, who reached here at noon, met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at his 7, Race Course Road residence this evening.

He will hold delegation-level talks with Mr Krishna tomorrow. He is also scheduled to hold a meeting with National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon before flying back home on Thursday.

This is Mr Rassuol's first official visit to India as his country's Foreign Minister though he has been here before as Afghan National Security Adviser. He had also made a transit halt here in April this year on his way to Thimphu, Bhutan for the SAARC Summit.

Mr Rassuol and Mr Krishna have met serveral times on the sidelines of various events, including on July 20 when the External Affairs Minister had visited Kabul for the Kabul Conference.

Mr Rassuol will be assisted at the talks with Mr Krishna by the Ambassador of Afghanistan in Delhi and the Director General of Foreign Affairs, among other officials. Mr Krishna will be assisted by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the Indian Ambassador in Kabul, among others.

Briefing mediapersons about the the visit, External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said the two countries were committed to deepen and strengthen their strategic partnership and the multi-faceted ties which, according to him, had been a factor for peace, stability and progress in the region.

He also pointed out that the two sides have been holding regular consultations at high levels to review and impart greater momentum to their ties.

Mr Prakash said Dr Singh and Afghan President Hamid Karzai had beeen meeting regularly and there were also regular meetings at the levels of the Foreign Ministers, National Security Advisers, Foreign Secretaries and other leaders and officials.

He said India had been extending unstinted support for the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan and was already the sixth largest donor to the war-ravaged country. He said India's bilateral assistance to Afghanistan was close to $ 1.3 billion and its projects had reached out to the common man in all parts of that country.

He said the Indian Medical Mission had treated more than 310,000 people, mostly women and children, free of cost in 2009.

Mr Prakash said India had been contributing to development of infrastructure including the 218-kilometre Zaranj-Delaram Road and the power transmission line from Pul-e-Khumri to Kabul.

He said India had also implemented some 50 small, quick-gestation, social and development projects in Afghanistan and a similar number was in the pipeline.

"We are playing an important role in capacity-building. Presently, 1350 scholarships, 675 each by ICCR and under the ITEC programme, are being made available annually in different disciplines to Afghanistan for capacity-building. Post London Conference, given the fact that the agricultural and related sectors are very important to Afghanistan, India has decided for a period of five years, to provide 100 fellowships annually to enable Afghans to pursue Masters and Ph.D. programmes and to 200 fresh graduates for degree programmes," he said.

"As significantly, despite the heinous attacks by forces inimical to India-Afghanistan friendship on our Embassy in Kabul in July 2008 and again in October 2009 and on Indian interests in February 2010, India remains committed to assisting the people and Government of Afghanistan, in their quest for a peaceful, pluralistic, democratic, and prosperous Afghanistan. This approach of India, this assistance of India that is being provided in Afghanistan, is positively reflected in a number of opinion polls conducted by independent agencies where the people of Afghanistan have spoken in very warm terms about what India has been doing," he added.

NNN

We are fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thus, emphasizing that the Taliban is a group of bad people is often a rhetorical point of emphasis. The Taliban’s poor treatment of women ["bad people"? "poor treatment"? did you even look at the photo?] often comes up as a sub-point here to illustrate the theme that the Taliban are bad. But actually altering social conditions in southern and eastern Afghanistan isn’t on the list of war aims.

And that makes sense. After all “invade and conquer southern and eastern Afghanistan” [yes, that's a fair way to put it, no straw men here at all] is neither a practical nor a cost-effective means of enhancing the well-being of the world’s women. You go to war for reasons of national security. Those reasons either stand up to scrutiny or they don’t.

The new foreign secretary can make the UK into a force for good in the world – he should start by reading Amnesty's new report

When the one-time foreign secretary Robin Cook became leader of the Commons in 2001 he famously "read himself into" his new role with a marathon 48-hour briefing session. As William Hague takes the measure of his new foreign secretary job, I urge him to steel himself for the challenges ahead with a little light reading: the new Amnesty International report 2010 (subtitled "The State of the World's Human Rights") published later this week.

Hague may not wish to devour our – often grim – 400-page opus in one weekend, but here are some reasons why he should place it on a handy bookshelf in his office.

First, Hague will naturally be seeking to put numerous bilateral and multilateral relations on "reset". Starting with the United States, the UK is re-establishing where it stands on key issues, always, of course, assessed against the UK national interest. The tools for this reassessment are many and varied – economic and military data are key – but "softer" indices of judgement play a major role. This realm, broadly "political", must, I believe, include human rights if Britain is to make the right choices in the world.

Take Afghanistan, Hague's avowed priority issue. Equipment for troops, dealing with the narcotics trade, assessing already complex relations with Pakistan and Iran, the US and Nato – each of these will play a part in policy formation. But what of human rights in Afghanistan? We've been told numerous times that UK forces are in Afghanistan to stop terrorists killing people on the streets of Britain. Yet politicians have readily cited human rights concerns – especially virulent anti-women policies from the Taliban – as further cause and justification.

As Afghanistan prepares for the "Peace Jirga" on 29 May, the question is increasingly: on what terms does the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai attempt a peace settlement with the "reconcilable" elements of the Taliban and other armed groups? The US and Nato view on this will be important, so the UK must consider this extremely carefully.

Hague will read on page 55 of the Amnesty report that in 2009 the Taliban and other anti-government groups actually "stepped up attacks against civilians, including attacks on schools and health clinics, across the country". Worryingly enough, the report makes clear, Afghan women and girls were targeted for attack by the Taliban and were also the subject of widespread societal discrimination, forced marriage, domestic violence and other abuse.

The danger now, then, is that a rush to stem Taliban violence through a "peace" deal will mean women's already fragile rights being traded away. The UK should have no part in this "trade-off".

Other enormous challenges ahead require the same human rights input for any informed foreign policy thinking. Iran is far more than a "nuclear issue", as the huge election protest movement last year demonstrated. If, for example, British personnel are again seized by the Iranian authorities, the Foreign Office needs to be thoroughly apprised of detention conditions, the risk of torture, the fairness of trials and a host of other human rights issues. Indeed the same applies to all countries: there is no clearer example of British interests intersecting with those of the citizens of other countries as when a British national is detained in a foreign jail next to political prisoners in, say, Burma, China or Saudi Arabia.

Diplomacy is a two-way street. But no meeting with a foreign leader or their foreign affairs ministers should take place without the foreign secretary being less than fully aware of what occurs in the police stations of that country (in some instances in the basement cells of ministry buildings themselves). It's as well to know that the smiling prime minister's own brother is accused of torture if you're about to sign a multimillion-pound trade deal.

Meanwhile foreign powers are adept at seeing the beam in our own eye if we broach their human rights failings. Getting our human rights house in order makes good sense internationally and domestically. The unpleasant fact is that the UK's involvement in "war on terror" secret detentions and torture left us exposed to justified criticism. Hague's announcement last week that there would be an inquiry into this is overdue but extremely welcome. Certainly we can have no claim to the moral high ground unless our record is significantly better than it has been.

The UK can be a force for good in the world in multiple ways – from firm support for the UN millennium development goals and an effective international criminal court, to continued championing of a global arms trade treaty and of lifesaving measures on maternal health and HIV/Aids treatments. In a speech to FCO staff on his first day in the job, Hague mentioned the importance of "international organisations", a promising enough sign that we'll be monitoring here in terms of support for human rights at the United Nations, the EU and elsewhere.

Hague and his Conservative-Lib Dem coalition colleagues have an opportunity to pursue an agenda of law, order and human rights at home and abroad. A well-informed, human rights-aware Foreign Office is a boon to good government and much will rest on the decisions taken in the first years of the new foreign secretary's tenure. As well as absorbing his FCO briefs, William Hague should read our report in full. I've already mailed him a copy.

Local Afghan women package harvested saffron as part of the Kentucky Agribusiness Development Team, Task Force Cyclone, Womens' Empowerment Project in Panjshir Province. The Womens' Empowerment Team of the Kentucky ADT educate women on things they can do at home, such as grow saffron and mushrooms and other things to improve their families lives.
Photo by US Army SGT Jo Lisa Ashley, Kentucky ADT Task Force Cyclone

This specialized unit is made up of service members from different backgrounds throughout the state of Kentucky.

Around 80% of Afghanistan’s populous is connected to the agriculture industry. Since Aug., the ADT has spent their deployment educating the local farmers and government on how to increase productivity, increase their market share and manage natural resources in Parwan, Panjshir, Kapisa and Bamyan provinces.

As a result of their work, the production of potatoes and onion has greatly increased in the Bamyan province.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. William T. Ewing, from Harrisburg, Ky., has a degree in Entomology and has been working with the Agricultural team during his deployment here.

“The Afghan people can grow a lot of crops,” said Ewing. “They are actually producing more than they consume or export, and we are teaching them how to export and store their crops longer.”

With the ADT’s help, pomegranate farmers in the Tagab district of the Kapisa province were able to export their crops to India and Dubai. Because they exported to these countries, they received three times their normal price for the crops.

Educating the people on natural resource management has been a key point of the ADT. Irrigation and reforestation advances should greatly improve agricultural production in Afghanistan.

U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Ray Norris, from Scottsburg, In., assigned to the 123rd Airlift Wing in Louisville, Ky., grew up on a family farm and volunteered to deploy with the ADT.

Norris spent some time in the Yakalong district of the Bamyan province where there is an eroded canal that provides water to about 800 family farms.

“There are not many organizations in this area helping the people,” said Norris. “We are working to get the materials so the people can make repairs themselves.”

The ADT has been working with the Minister of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (MAIL), and the Director of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock (DAIL) at the provincial levels in the Parwan, Panjshir, Bamyan and Kapisa provinces.

U.S. Army Col. Mike D. Farley, from Corbin, Ky., is the commander of the ADT and is glad to be a part of this important and unique mission.

“We are here to help the people increase the nutritional value in the country and sustain a better and healthier lifestyle,” said Farley.

We are working directly with the MAIL and the DAIL’s, to give them the knowledge to help their people, said Farley.

The ADT has also been working to teach the women of Afghanistan techniques to improve their home life.

U.S. Army Sgt. Jo Lisa Ashley, of Eubank, Ky. is the ADT’s women’s empowerment coordinator for the team.

“Most women here work at home, they take care of their families and the household duties,” said Ashley. “I am working with them on projects that they can do at home to bring in extra income.”

The Afghan government is working side-by-side with Ministry of Women’s Affairs and they are doing a great job about going out and showing that they support these programs for the women, said Ashley.

Danger of attack still 'very real' says foreign secretary after al-Qaida leader appears to claim responsibility for Christmas Day bombing attempt

The foreign secretary today warned that the danger of a terrorist attack remained "very real" hours after an audio tape was released in which Osama bin Laden appeared to claim responsibility for the attempted bombing of an airliner over Detroit.

David Miliband said the Christmas Day bomb scare demonstrated that links could exist between different terrorist groups, but urged caution about the al-Qaida leader's latest message, aired on Al-Jazeera television.

"Let's wait to see what he actually says; we know that the al-Qaida senior leadership are in the badlands of the Afghan-Pakistan border, probably on the Pakistan side," he told BBC One's Andrew Marr Show. "We know too that the Detroit attack was the first time that al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula, which is a sub-group of the al-Qaida franchise, it's the first time the Detroit attack that represents an attack on the west rather than an attack within the Middle East."

On the tape broadcast on al-Jazeera, a voice said to be Bin Laden addressed words directly to Barack Obama, the US president.

"The message I want to convey to you through the plane of the hero Omar Farouk [Abdulmutallab], reaffirms a previous message that the heroes of 9/11 conveyed to you," the tape said. "America will never dream of living in peace unless we live it in Palestine. It is unfair that you enjoy a safe life while our brothers in Gaza suffer greatly."

It added: "God willing, our raids on you will continue as long as your support to the Israelis will continue."

Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian national, has been charged with attempting to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight as it approached Detroit Metro airport on Christmas Day. But the bomb hidden in his underwear failed to explode. Abdulmutallab told US investigators afterward that he had been trained by al-Qaida operatives in Yemen.

Yemen has launched a series of air strikes targeting al-Qaida leaders since the Detroit incident and has declared that some top leaders, including Qasim al-Raymi and Ayed al-Shabwani, have been killed – claims that al-Qaida has denied. The US has been supplying military equipment, intelligence and training to Yemen to destroy suspected al-Qaida hideouts.

Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula originally took credit for the Detroit incident, but in the latest tape, it is Bin Laden who claims primary responsibility. There was no way of confirming the authenticity of the tape, but it resembled previous recordings attributed to Bin Laden, who is believed to be somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman, Andy David, dismissed Bin Laden's attempt to link Israel with attacks on the US.

"This is nothing new; he has said this before. Terrorists always look for absurd excuses for their despicable deeds," he said.

The last public message from Bin Laden appears to have been on September 26, when he demanded that European countries pull their troops out of Afghanistan. That audio tape also warned of "retaliation" against countries allied with the US in the war.

The Home Office said a raised terror threat level would not cause "any discernible difference" for the British public. The home secretary, Alan Johnson, increased the threat level from "substantial" to "severe" on Friday night – meaning he considers an attack "highly likely".

According to the Sunday Telegraph, his move came amid fears that al-Qaida terrorist cells had trained women, who may not be of Arabic appearance, to carry out suicide attacks. The Home Office said it was unable to comment on whether the two were linked, but insisted the threat level was raised only in consideration of an "entire body" of information.

Richard Clarke, a former chief White House counter-terrorism adviser, told the paper: "They (al-Qaida) have trained women.

"There are others who are still out there who have been trained and who are clean skins – that means people who we do not have a record of, people who may not look like al-Qaida terrorists, who may not be Arabs and may not be men."

The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, chairman of the home affairs sub-committee on counterterrorism, criticised the lack of information from the government.

He told the BBC: "We have had absolutely no guidance from this government about what to spot, about what to be suspicious of and how to report it."

But the independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, Lord Carlile of Berriew, said the government was right to announce the change in the threat level.

"It is absolutely essential that there should be public vigilance and the government has – quite rightly – decided that if you don't tell the public to be vigilant, they are not going to be vigilant," he said.

Gordon Brown announced new measures last week, including a suspension of direct flights between the UK and Yemen and a "no-fly list" to prevent people with suspected militant links from travelling to Britain.

The escalation of the threat level reverses a decision in July last year to downgrade the likelihood of a terror attack from "severe" to "substantial".

JTAC, a unit within MI5, sets the level based on an analysis of intelligence. The assessment covers potential attacks by al-Qaida or linked extremist groups.

There are five levels of threat, ranging from low – meaning an attack is unlikely, to critical – when an attack is expected imminently.

KABUL, Afghanistan – The Afghan parliament delivered another rebuke to President Hamid Karzai on Saturday when it rejected 10 of the 17 ministers he proposed on his second try at forming a government – the latest sign that his fraud-tainted election victory has weakened his leadership.

Karzai secured parliamentary approval for his longtime national security aide, Zalmay Roussel, as foreign minister and nominees for justice and counternarcotics. But he went down to defeat in a host of areas that affect the daily lives of Afghans – from health to telecommunications.

For a country in a U.S.-backed war of survival against a fast-spreading Taliban Islamist insurgency, the vote will slow the establishment of an effective government, but it also signaled the first democratic stirrings in a body that previously had achieved little of note.

Members of parliament said they voted down candidates who were closely affiliated with former warlords or were unknown in the capital. But some of those defeated had been viewed with high esteem by leading figures.

Sima Samar, director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, said of the defeat of two female candidates, "I'm really distressed that two good ones lost." She said Karzai didn't sufficiently support Soraya Dalil for health minister, or Palwasha Hassan for minister of women's affairs.

Samar was critical of Karzai's successful Justice Ministry pick, Habibullah Ghalib, and European officials – particularly the British – are very concerned that Zarar Ahmad Moqbel is now minister of counternarcotics. But that pick apparently was an IOU by Karzai to Moqbel, who campaigned for him in provinces north of Kabul.

Possibly to spite the British, legislators gave Moqbel 162 votes out of 223, the highest number for any candidate.

The voting by secret ballot took about five hours to complete, and the laborious hand count was broadcast live on radio and television. Kabul was gripped by the spectacle. Tradesmen in the main bazaar listened in their stalls or stores, and many weren't happy with the outcome.

"The parliament is acting independently. But the game will continue," said watchmaker Mohammad Sharif Niazi. "Whatever parliament does, Karzai is our leader. We don't have an alternative."

The vote came two weeks to the day after parliament dealt its first rebuke to Karzai, approving only seven of 24 Cabinet positions. It raised doubts of whether he'll be able to present a full government when he travels to London Jan. 28 for a major international conference on the future of Afghanistan.

Tory attack flyers backfire

Conservative MPs have upset many Montrealers with their scurrilous attack ads, mailed to people with Jewish-sounding names in ridings with significant numbers of Jewish voters.

There is much that is abhorrent about the tactic itself and the content. Many of those who received the flyer are furious that the Conservatives assume, falsely, that Canadian Jews base their vote on support for Israel, over and above the community members’ long-standing preoccupation with social justice, health care, the environment and a host of other issues.

While most Montreal Jews do support the federal Liberals, for a variety of historical and policy reasons, they do not vote as a bloc. Even more egregious are the statements in the flyer, which Mount Royal MP Irwin Cotler has denounced as “close to hate speech.” The pamphlet accuses the Liberals of “willingly participating in the overly anti-Semitic Durban I – the human rights conference in South Africa that Cotler attended in 2001 along with a Canadian delegations. In fact, Cotler, along with Israeli government encouragement, showed courage and leadership by staying on, along with representatives of major Jewish organizations, in an effort to combat and bear witness to what turned into an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic hate fest. The flyer also falsely accuses the Liberals of being opposed to “defunding Hamas” and asking that Hezbollah be delisted as a terrorist organization. In fact, the Liberals in 2002 took the lead in branding the two Islamist groups as terrorist organizations, making financial support illegal.

If the Conservatives think they will make inroads with Montreal voters with these untruths and sleazy tactics, they are sadly mistaken.

Spectre of Vietnam looms in Afganistan

US President Barack Obama’s announcement of a 30,000-soldier surge to counter the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, bringing to 100,000 the United States’ military commitment to the region, is bound to fail. The parallels with Vietnam are only too obvious. The only possible positive thing we can foresee at this point is that the boost may take some of the heat off Canada’s 3,000-troop Afghanistan contingent, which is to end its combat role in 2011.

On paper, one can wonder how it is that the Taliban, with an estimated force of about 15,000 poorly armed soldiers, can manage to hold out against a coalition of 43 nations equipped with the most sophisticated weaponry and communications capability. The short answer is that, much as in Vietnam, there is a fierce and ingrained determination among the various Afghan peoples to reject foreign interference in their affairs, going back to the British withdrawal more than a century ago and up to the more recent and disastrous attempt by Russian forces to sustain the unpopular Communist regime. The rugged mountainous terrain is an ideal staging ground and hiding place for insurgents. That is among the reasons why US troops failed to capture Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora area in December 2001.

In Vietnam, US and allied forces were propping up a hated and corrupt regime. Military expert Anthony Cordesman recently told the Washington Post that the regime of Hamid Karzai is “a grossly over-centralized government that is corrupt, is often a tool of power brokers and narco-­traffickers, and lacks basic capacity in virtually every ministry.”

The ballot stuffing that was a feature of Karzai’s recent re-election is but a shadow of the deeper problem. The Afghan version of what was called the “Vietnamization” in the early 1970s is training more Afghan soldiers and police. That is hardly reassuring to Afghanis who know that a uniform there is carte blanche for extortion and abuse. The arrival of 30,000 more Americans can only mean more riches for the Afghani elite whose assistance and cooperation will be needed to provide the infrastructure necessary for their health, safety and security. Let us not forget how deep is the cultural gap that separates that country from our liberal democratic values. Take women’s rights. The recent compromise on family law, after the international outcry over the initial draft in which married women could not refuse sex with their husbands, is this: A husband may deny food to his spouse, even until death, for refusing to have sex with her husband. A wife is now allowed to work outside the home, but only with her husband’s permission.

Thomas Friedman, the respected New York Times columnist, warns that the idea the US and its allies can transform Afghanistan is problematic at best, and deepening the commitment with limited prospects of anything like a victory is “a prescription for disaster.” We say prepare now for some kind of compromise by encouraging the Afghan regime to reach out to the insurgents. Afghanistan will not in our lifetimes adopt our value system. The best we can hope for is to lay the groundwork for building schools, training teachers, doctors, nurses, and engineers and inculcating the essence of our traditions and the rule of law to a new educated elite. Maybe a decent life will be possible in at least parts of the country, justifying to some degree the sacrifice of more than 132 Canadian soldiers since 2002. Ultimately, and sooner than some may think, it will be up to the Afghans to fashion the framework of their society.

Tremblay, Bergeron step up to the plate

While only 39 per cent of eligible voters turned out for last month’s municipal elections, Montrealers voted wisely in re-electing Mayor Gérald Tremblay, but with a reduced majority.

The alleged scandals in construction and water-meter contracts had a lot to do with it, but voters appeared to agree that the mayor himself was not involved. They seemed to say, however, that he should have been more vigilant. With that in mind, he has added the chair of the executive committee and the role of Ville Marie borough mayor to his responsibilities.

Voters also indicated a desire for change by choosing Richard Bergeron’s Projet Montreal to run Plateau Mont Royal borough, and electing to the central city council former Gazette investigative reporter Alexander Norris. Mayor Tremblay has acknowledged this important breakthrough by giving Bergeron responsibility for urban planning. This is an opportunity for him and his party to show whether they have what it takes to persuade Montrealers in four years that they should be in charge.